


The Lost Boys

by bloop18, Cybrid



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Dubious Cuddling, Fairies, Fanart, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 09:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16115582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloop18/pseuds/bloop18, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cybrid/pseuds/Cybrid
Summary: Tom and Harry are tiny fairies, small enough to fit in a Muggle's hand. Tom leads a band of vicious trickster fairies that can only be appeased by gifts like saucers of milk and shiny things. Harry is a helpful fairy, the kind that shows up in the night and helps with difficult craft projects like making shoes. Harry and Tom always clash whenever they end up in the same house at night.





	The Lost Boys

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CeNedraRiva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeNedraRiva/gifts).



> CeNedraRiva wrote the prompt, which inspired Blop to make the art, which inspired Cy to write! And thus we have this little fic/art collab.

*~*~*~*

Some fairies make their homes in hedgerows or hollowed-out trees, in caves by the coast or beneath waterfalls, in church spires and abandoned buildings. Others prefer a more domestic existence. They creep into the attics and basements of warm human houses and live off the things thrown away.

Harry Potter was born on the very top shelf of an airing closet in Godric's Hollow. His proud parent cooed over his tiny gossamer wings, his first words, his first flight. But they passed away when he was still too small to live by himself, so the neighboring Weasley family took him in.

The Weasleys were kind. Their nest, affectionately called the Burrow by all its occupants, was made up of many tiny rooms, piled higgledy-piggledy on top of each other inside a disconnected chimney stack. It was a lovely nest, warm and welcoming, with walls made of brightly coloured cereal boxes and beds made of matchsticks and yellow sponge.

The house the stack belonged to was large and full of human children. There was a lot to do. Harry learned, along with Ron and Fred and George and Ginny, to darn clothes and play with cats and make nice food to leave out.

"It's giving back," Mrs. Weasley would say, as she set a hotpot of turnip ends and rice grains down on the ancient wooden spindle that served as the Burrow's dining table. "We look after the house for the humans, and in return we take a little for ourselves."

It was a happy place to live. Harry liked the work of scavenging and the camaraderie that came with a big family. But time marched inevitably on, and, one by one, all the human children moved out. There wasn't much left to do around the house, and less food thrown away by the humans. Soon enough, Bill and Charlie were flying off to make nests of their own.

Harry didn’t want to be a bother either. So, on the evening of his seventeenth birthday, he took off into the twilit sky to find a little house for himself. He had all sorts of adventures along the way; swarms of moths, smatterings of raindrops, an unfortunate run-in with a bat. But he flew and flew until the lights of the city were sparse and spread out into little clumps beneath him. Finally, just as he was nearing the end of his strength, he happened upon a little cottage on the outskirts of a village. It was just two stories high, with paned glass windows and a gently sloping roof. Harry found a missing brick in the eaves and moved right in.

The next days were busy, as Harry learned the routine of the house. Three humans lived there; they called themselves Mummy, Daddy, and Sarah.

Adults can't see fairies, but children can, every once in a while. Sarah waved to him while he was poking around in search of things to furnish his nest. Harry held a finger to his lips.

He snuck away cotton wool balls and packed them into the space left by the missing brick. It was still a little cold in his half-inside, half-outside nest, but it was nice to curl up under a dusting cloth and watch the rain falling outside. Every now and again, a robin would poke its head inside to say hello.

 It was a simple place, and maybe a little lonely, but it was Harry's all the same.

*~*~*~*

It was night-time and the clocks around the village were striking twelve. Harry folded up the dust cloth, stretched, and took off into the cool autumn air. He snuck into the house through the broken kitchen extractor fan and began his nightly rounds.

Shoes were arranged in the shoe rack, the TV remote was rescued from between two cushions, and crayons were put neatly back in their packet in colour order. The cat, a fat, ginger beast, yowled at him as he was cleaning the kitchen, so Harry played with it for a while, then left out a saucer of milk.

Up the narrow staircase, the only sounds were the humans' soft breaths. Harry found a gold earring under the bed and put it on the nightstand. He rescued a bee - a big one, almost as long as his forearm - from the bathroom, and flew it outside to be free.

Humans don’t notice fairy magic. Their brains come up with explanations for it.

 _Simon left out the cookies for me_ , Rebecca thought. She smiled as she picked one up on the way out to the car to start her early shift.  _Rebecca polished my glasses clean_ , Simon thought, as he pushed them up on his nose and began getting Sarah ready for school.

"Harry found my favourite green pencil!" Sarah told him as he did up her shoes. "Harry's very clever!"

Harry, watching from behind a picture frame, beamed with pride. If he'd been flying, he would have twirled a circle in midair! He was very clever, wasn't he? This grown-up fairy stuff wasn't hard at all.

*~*~*~*

He was still smiling at the memory the following night, as he fluttered downstairs to the coat rack. He checked the coat pockets for stray coins and put them in the swear jar, then checked on the shoes--

Oh. Simon's shoelaces were tied together.

Harry puzzled over the little mystery. Simon would hardly have tied his own shoelaces together. Maybe Sarah had done it? But Sarah couldn’t even tie her own shoelaces . . .

Perhaps it was an accident. Things do get tangled together sometimes. Harry worked at the knot for a little while, and before long the shoes were neat again.

He thought little more of it. But the next day, Rebecca's bracelet was missing. Harry watched from a hiding place as she searched for it. He could have sworn it was in the jewelry box too.

Gradually, other things started to go missing. Cookies disappeared before morning came, or were left half-eaten. Sarah got in trouble for chewing on them. The TV remote controller couldn’t be found for days, then reappeared, batteries taken out. The cat would suddenly leap up in surprise and run from room to room, while the adults watched in amazement.

Harry didn't understand what had gone wrong. So one night he decided to stay up late, past 3 a.m. when he normally went to sleep, and watch the cookie plate from the shadowy space behind the spice rack.

*~*~*~*

"That was a good one!"

Harry jerked out of a doze at the sound of laughter, loud and carefree. He peered cautiously out from behind the rack.

Fairies.  _Other fairies_.

But unlike any Harry had met before. They wore fancy clothes with froths of lace and big mother of pearl buttons. The one closest to him wore a thin golden chain looped over his shoulder like a sash.

And they were  _taking_ the food!

Harry watched with mounting fury as two burly fairies took off into the air with a whole cookie held between them. Across the room, a red-haired man ripped open a packet of candied almonds. He made a great show of selecting the best specimens, then shoved the remainder off the edge of the counter to scatter across the floor. A female with a head of black curls and dark, iridescent purple wings pulled on the cat's tail until it yowled.

The leader was obvious. He hovered in the centre of the mayhem, directing.

"Fetch me one of those buttons, Rodolphus! And Bella, stop playing with the cat!" He landed gracefully next to the cookie plate Harry had left out and stood, arms folded, as the other fairies crowded around, holding out pilfered objects for his approval.

Harry, still hiding, vibrated with rage. He had to fold his wings to stop them from buzzing. How dare they? Why did they have to do this? Why could they not just be nice? He wanted to confront them, to chase them out of  _his_  house--

But there were an awful lot of them. Harry bit his lip, caught in an agony of indecision.

Then a fairy flew right past his hiding place, bearing Sarah's green crayon.

"STOP!" Harry cried, unable to bear any more. He flung himself out from behind the spice rack, much to the amazement of the thief, and wrestled the crayon away from him. He retreated back against the tiled wall, clutching it in his arms.

The other fairy recovered quickly. He had short blonde hair and very pale blue eyes. "Oho," he said, drawing closer. "And what do we have here?"

Harry shrank back as a second fairy landed, crowding him in. "Looks like a soft little house fairy," the newcomer said, scratching his stubbled chin. "I reckon the boss will want a look at him."

Suddenly, confrontation seemed like a very bad idea.

Harry fought as they grabbed him, but it was useless. Within moments the two fairies had him held firmly between them. They took to the air and deposited him none-too-gently in front of the dark-haired leader.

He was tall for a fairy, with lovely periwinkle-blue wings. Younger too, than most of his cronies, perhaps only a few summers into adulthood.

He looked Harry over at leisure, from the scuffed shoes that Mr. Weasley had made last winter, to the cotton trousers and warm woolen jumper. When his eyes, dark and amused, reached Harry's face, he grinned and swept into an exaggerated courtly bow.

"Good evening," he said, touching an imaginary cap. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Tom, and these scoundrels are the Knights of Walpurgis."

Harry glared, still held captive between two of the aforementioned scoundrels. "It's not a pleasure to make yours! What are you doing?"

Tom's eyebrows rose. "Why, taking what we want, of course. What else?"

Harry stared at him. Until that moment, he had thought all fairies were like the Weasleys; kind, humble, and grateful to the humans who provided the things they needed to live. The idea of breaking into a human house and stealing and vandalising was utterly outside his understanding.

"But you can't do that!"

"Why not?"

"The humans! They'll miss their stuff."

"Why should I care?" Tom stepped forward and poked Harry in the chest. "Why should  _you_  care? What have humans ever done for us?"

"They let us stay in their houses!"

Tom threw his head back and laughed. The other fairies paused in their thieving to join in, filling the little kitchen with tinkling laughter. The cat mewled.

"Let?" the fairy finally asked, pretending to wipe a tear from his eye. "Let? They can't stop us, little house fairy. Every house has a few holes; we can  _always_  find a way in."

He was a monster, Harry realised. He struggled again in the grip of his two guards.

Tom watched him with half-lidded eyes. The same stare the cat made when it watched a moth flutter against a closed window.

"You want to leave?" he asked softly.

Harry was scared.

"Yes," he said, working hard to keep his voice steady. He wasn’t entirely successful.

Tom smiled. "I see. I'll let you go . . . on one condition."

"What's that?"

"I'll trade your freedom for your name."

In the courts of the Greater Fae, to know the name of another being is to have great power over them. For their smaller, humbler cousins though, names are no more than simple monikers, given without thought or consequence.

Harry shivered anyway, in ancestral memory. He struggled a little more, but knew it was no good. He was firmly held.

"Harry," he whispered finally.

"What was that?" Tom asked. His long, pale fingers tilted Harry's chin up. "You'll have to speak a little louder."

"My name is Harry!"

"Harry," Tom repeated, rolling the name around on his tongue. "A humble little name, for a humble little fairy."

That was a bit rich, coming from someone called  _Tom_ , Harry thought but did not say. But perhaps Tom saw it in the quirk of his lips, for his eyes hardened and his fingers dug deep enough into Harry's jaw to leave a bruise.

Then he smiled, breaking the moment, and stepped gracefully away. "Rodolphus, Barty," he said, to the fairies holding Harry. "If you'd be so kind…"

The grip on Harry's arms loosened at once. Harry shook himself out of their hold, then took several quick steps back. No one stopped him, so Harry spun around, raced to the edge of the worktop and leapt off into the air.

The robber fairies laughter followed him as he fled back to his nest. Harry curled up in a tight ball under the dust cloth, both furious and scared.

*~*~*~*

Over the next few days, Harry thought many times about flying off to find another house. But it was now late October and the nights were drawing in. The chances of him finding another suitable spot before the first frost were low.

So he stayed.

Bad things kept happening around the house. Harry began working a double shift - doing his normal nightly rounds and then doing them again after the Knights of Walpurgis left. He had a terrible suspicion, however, that they had caught onto his trick, for they were staying later and later every night.

The final straw came on the evening before Sarah's birthday. Harry watched with horror as the gang unwrapped a beribboned present and exclaimed covetously over the package of beads inside. One bold fairy opened the fridge and plucked the cherry off the cake Simon had made.

"Look at this, boss, they've got little candles and everything!"

"Stop! Just stop!" Harry shouted, springing out of the cupboard he'd been hiding in, red-faced and practically in tears.

The fairies all twirled in the air to face him. But the surprise on their faces turned swiftly to mirth.

"If it isn’t the little-bitty house fairy again," cooed the female as she fluttered a leisurely circle around him.

"Have we been naughty?" asked the fairy with the cherry. "Have you come to tell us off?"

But Harry had had enough. He squared his shoulders and launched himself off the shelf, landing lightly in front of Tom, who stood dead in the centre of the kitchen table. Bella followed him, scowling, but when she went to grab him, Tom held up a hand to halt her.

"Harry," he said, drawing out the name. "I did wonder when we'd see you again."

"This needs to stop!" Harry snarled, gesturing to the spilt beads, the plundered fridge. "Go bother some other house!"

Tom cocked his head to the side. "Or?"

"I-- what do you mean?"

"Or what?" Tom asked. "It's no good delivering an ultimatum like that if you don’t have anything to back it up with. Have you ever heard of the carrot and the stick? To make someone do something, you must either have something to give, or something to threaten."

"I shouldn't need to threaten you! You should just see that it is wrong, and stop!"

"No," Tom said. He stretched lazily. "No, I don’t see that it is wrong. Why should I not take the things that I want?"

"You're like a spoiled child!" Harry cried, frustrated. His hands curled into fists.

Tom didn’t miss the gesture. "Oh," he said silkily. "Would you like to fight me, Harry?"

For a split second, Harry considered it. Smashing that smug look right off his face. Tom was no more than a summer or two older than him; tall, but built slim.

But there was an unpleasant gleam in his dark eyes and a readiness in his stance. He knew Harry couldn’t win, outnumbered as he was.

"I see," Tom said, when Harry didn’t move. "A pity. We could have had some  _fun_."

Harry scowled back.

"If you have no stick," the fairy mused, circling around him, "you'll need a carrot. What will you give me in return for leaving this house and never coming back?"

"I don't have anything," Harry ground out.

"Hmmm..." Tom hummed. "Maybe you don’t own anything of value. But there's something else you could give."

"What?"

The fairy circled round in front of him. "Why, yourself, of course."

Harry stepped back. All the thoughts had flown out of his head; anger swept away by fear and complete disbelief.

Tom's smile didn’t slip. "That would certainly be a suitable repayment," he continued. "We could do with a nice house fairy to fix up our clothes and cook for us. Food that  _we_  want - I don’t much like the raisins you put in your cookies; in the future, it should only be chocolate chip."

"No," Harry said, when he regained his voice. "No way--"

"I thought you wanted us gone."

Harry's mouth worked soundlessly. He looked around at the fairies encircling them from the air. They all wore wide grins.

"I… okay. Okay. I'll leave out chocolate chip cookies for you and mend anything you bring me. Just do your foraging elsewhere."

"Oh  _Harry_." Tom stepped forward and gripped his upper arms. "I think there's been a misunderstanding," he said, with very convincing gentleness, as his thumbs rubbed soothing circles. "I'm not willing to  _share_  with the humans. If you're mine, you're mine. I'll take  _you_ , and in exchange, we'll make no more mischief here."

Harry tried to pull away, but as soon as he did, several of the Knights dropped to the tabletop behind him.

But, to his surprise, Tom let go of his arms and gestured at his minions to stay back.

"It's a free choice," he said. "I won't force you."

Harry wanted nothing more than to push past him, run to the edge of the table and flee back to his own small nest again. It was cold, and not so cosy as he'd like, but it was private and safe and entirely  _his_.

But he couldn’t live like this, coming down, night after night, to chaos and an unhappy cat. Hearing Simon and Rebecca argue in the mornings and Sarah crying. He blinked back tears, carefully unclenched his fists…

And nodded.

Tom smiled wide. "A pleasure doing business with you," he said, eyes glinting with avarice.

And then, to Harry's utmost horror, he strode forwards, grabbed him around the thighs and swung him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.

"I can fly!" Harry cried, beating his fists against Tom's back. "I'm coming with you willingly!"

"You feel more like a prize this way."

Harry hit him a few more times, then ceased, realising it was hopeless. He hung limp in Tom's grip, red-faced and humiliated, as the fairy took off. The Knights followed him into the air, leaving the rest of the night's haul abandoned on the table.

*~*~*~*

The Knights of Walpurgis had their den in the six-inch gap beneath the floorboards of a house down the street. Harry's first impression was that it was a big, open space, richly decorated with stolen fabrics and shiny trinkets. There were spools of thread to sit on, piles of boiled sweets still in their wrappings, and even a finely-carved miniature table that must have been stolen from a dollhouse. A few fairies were there to greet them; two females and a male, and several small children. One little sprite threw herself into Bella's arms the moment they arrived, chattering away about a mouse she had spoken to.

"How do you like our little place?" Tom asked. He seemed very pleased with himself, and, grudgingly, Harry knew he had the right to be. It was as nice a den as anyone could imagine, although not as warm and cosy as The Burrow.

The fairies were in high spirits. They crowded around him, laughing, asking questions, commenting on the colour of his wings. Harry cowered back against the wall, and was grateful when Tom shooed them off good-naturedly; "I found him, so he's mine. Hands off."

It was almost like a party. A music box was brought out and wound. The lid lifted to reveal a tiny, rotating ballerina, and the metallic chimes of some familiar tune. The fairies danced and sang and ate. There was plenty of food, probably plundered from another unsuspecting house. Apple slices and crackers as big as Harry's torso, a huge block of fudge and several roast potatoes. Tom sat at the edge of the table and carved, with great ceremony, a single barbecued chicken wing, doling out potions to his gang with an air of great benevolence. Harry sat on an upturned yoghurt pot, staring longingly at the exit.

It must have been almost dawn when the fairies began to disperse. Some had their own rooms, partitioned off by curtains made of stolen velvet, while others bedded down in a communal nest of feathers and silk pincushions.

Harry sat there, not knowing whether he was meant to join them. Tom made the decision for him. He silently offered him a hand up and led him to a room at the far end of the den. There were more shiny objects here; a veritable dragon's hoard of rings, bracelets, pins and belt buckles. There was a bed too, a cosy thing made of fleecy fabrics and a strip of faux fur, probably ripped from a hat or a hood.

Harry balked. This was Tom's room. Tom's nest.

"Here no, none of that," Tom said, pushing him into the room with a hand on his back. "You'll sleep here with me. It's going to be winter soon, and I need someone to keep my bed warm while I'm out foraging."

He was obviously very pleased with this idea, but Harry was aghast.

"You kidnapped me to keep your bed warm?" he hissed.

"Yes. Now get in."

"Can't one of your minions do it?"

Tom sniffed. "No. I don't want them to get ideas above their station."

Harry dithered. Tom rolled his eyes.

"You could share the main nest, if you like. I'm sure they'd be happy to have you."

It wasn't proper. They'd all slept separately at The Burrow; sharing was a thing for mated pairs.

"Come on," Tom said, drawing him to the bed and pushing him onto his back. "I know you're sleepy." He crawled in next to Harry and flung his arm over his middle as if cuddling some kind of soft toy. "You'll be good here," he mumbled into Harry's neck. "I've always wanted a house fairy of my own."

Harry stared at him in disbelief, but Tom had already closed his eyes, apparently settling in to sleep. For all his talk about the bed being cold, his captor was a warm weight against his side. Harry blinked. How was this his life?


End file.
